Marduk City

[Rakhasa]

This is a teaser for the City of Marduk, which I have barely started becuse I kept geting distracted playing with the map. It shows the city at the end of Season two, late 2014.
The description will follow later. Eventually.
Marduk is on Plynus Crater, a 32-km circular crater between Mares Serenitas and Tranquilitas. The letters (a-h) are city districts, while the numbers (1-16) are points of interest. As of october 2014, 15 and 16 are two abbeys build for decorative purposes (one romanic catholic and one tibetan buddist), but still empty.


P.D. And why does the image look so small? Do I need to change settings or something?
P.P.D. Well, here it is, with oustide hosting

[Bob Schroeck]

And why does the image look so small? Do I need to change settings or something?

Hard to say on my part, as I have a high-resolution screen and a lot of things look small. The image that you've embedded, though, comes to me as 570W 352H -- is that the size you created the map at?
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Rakhasa]

No, the map is 947W 545H. Weird. It is a bmp, through, wich may be the reason -the profile image did not load when I used a bmp, but when I changed it to jgp it loaded with no problems... let me check:

Edit: Nope, still small.  But the words do look clearer.
Edit 2: I dunnot if the board has bandwith limits, but I took off the small picture anyway.

[Dartz]

use imgur.com . Yuku scales images down.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Rakhasa]

Well, I always used imagesack, but since yuku have the service... Here we go.

[robkelk]

An astroball stadium? (raises eyebrow) That's a zero-g game, played in one-person spaceships... I wouldn't expect to see a venue for it on any planetary surface.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Rakhasa]

An astroball stadium? (raises eyebrow) That's a zero-g game, played in one-person spaceships... I wouldn't expect to see a venue for it on any planetary surface.

~squints~ Er... I honestly meant a footbal (well, soccer) stadium. A general 'dane athletics sports field, actually. How the (censored) did I type astroball????

[Foxboy]

Okay, Marduk is probably the non-Girl Genius steampunk fen hangout, or the people who liked Kandor's concept but balked at the "silliness" of a "Superhero Town."
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll

[Warringer]

An astroball stadium? (raises eyebrow) That's a zero-g game, played in one-person spaceships... I wouldn't expect to see a venue for it on any planetary surface.

~squints~ Er... I honestly meant a footbal (well, soccer) stadium. A general 'dane athletics sports field, actually. How the (censored) did I type astroball????

You didn't just call it soccer, did you?

[robkelk]

I suspect that most folks in Fenspace who would play Grid-iron (US) football are playing other sports instead, excepting possibly the TSAB and the Roughriders.

One could mark the field as a football field, and make a note saying it's for all types - Association (soccer), Grid-iron (US), Rugby, Australian-rules, and full-contact Quiddich (which I just made up)...
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Cobalt Greywalker]

Sorry, but I have a major SOD failure for the concept of Marduk City. Namely, how the HELL did it get domed?

Kandor City a.k.a Crater Daniell required the resources of an entire FACTION to dome. Crater Plinius is larger so I very much doubt a single Fen has the resources (outside Noah Scott or Criss Marsden, who have F***-loads of money, and even THEN I'd be sceptical) to do so without a fairly good history (to build the machines that built the machines, etc...) OR being the owner of Clark Universal Construction (and by it's name, it's a Supers company).

[Rakhasa]

The stadium is an european style athletics field: the track on the outer ring, and a green field in the middle, than usually doubles as a soccer (football! its name is football, you colonial savages!) field, but can be adapted for the usual athletics circus -javelin throwing, pole vault, and the like-
In fact, it is used mainly as an athletism stadium, because Marduk is ludicrously overbuilt -but don't tell then that, they will immediately point to Trinity Towers, than will be able to house all of the current Kandor once they are built.. and they are goths, who knows how they will get even.
Marduk city itself has about 30,000 people, one or two thousand more in the smaller villages in the crater; but it has housing for at least three times this population (it also has tourists, up to 10-15,000 at the height of the season, but they usually stay in a hotel rather than renting a house). Oscar -and Bernie, who is the architect and seldom takes "no" for an answer when designing houses- did not see reason for moderation.
The city is covered by stone buildings, statues, townhouses and palaces, many empty. It can get a bit creepy when the two weeks of lunar night come (again, this is a goth city. They like creepy things anyway); though the empty buildings were very useful when there was need to house thousands of belter refugees at the height of the Boskonian War. Most have since returned home, but Ningal district still has a distinct belter identity.
But the city is still way too big (for now, Mardukians always point). Both stadiums have more seating than the entire city population; the Great Library is a magnificent building, with amazing computerized records. And only a few thousand physical books. The opera season is only two months long. The Cortes could double as a parliament house for many nation-states. It has two monumental cathedrals, catholic and fenspace church, of exactly the same area (a few square meters smaller than St Leibowitz in Mars) and several churches and temples (also, a "cathedral" is not a cathedral unless the Vatican creates a diocese and ordains a bishop, but who cares for those details when printing travel guides? besides, Oscar is sure than the Vatican will eventually have to create sees outside earth), despite it not being that religious.  And there are two highly decorative, and empty, abbeys (catholic and buddist) in the countryside -a third, a shinto temple, was settled in the summer of 2013 by a group of Senshi mikos.
The crater has five villages, though three have less than one hundred people. It also is dotted by a dozen or so empty keeps and villas, and shrines, carved stelles and random decoration all over it. It looks very green, but, except for the city parks and the three areas with different color, the greenery is just shrubs, grasses and a few hardy trees like holly; the soil outside those zones is still too poor for forest or agriculture.
It is too big. They know. And they do not care.

Edit:

Sorry, but I have a major SOD failure for the concept of Marduk City. Namely, how the HELL did it get domed?
Kandor City a.k.a Crater Daniell required the resources of an entire FACTION to dome. Crater Plinius is larger so I very much doubt a single Fen has the resources (outside Noah Scott or Criss Marsden, who have F***-loads of money, and even THEN I'd be sceptical) to do so without a fairly good history (to build the machines that built the machines, etc...) OR being the owner of Clark Universal Construction (and by it's name, it's a Supers company).

 
Clark Construction is not the only builder company; Oscar and Bernie do not have those loads of money, but they are the owners of Genesis Construction & Development, another construction company.
This is Marduk at the end of season two. The first building of Marduk is #4, the Genesis Ziggurat, wich was a normal(ish), closed habitat. This will eventually be told when I finish the timeline, and I plan to write one or two fics of this, but they origianlly settled in Kandor when the city construction started, began the company building parts of Kandor, and they did not start the Marduk dome until the Kandor dome was finished. In fact, Kandor's dome was build, o fnot paid, by a partnership of Genesis, Clark Universal, and one or two companies more (fenspace is BIG, and there was a lot of counstruction going on. Just like Rockhounds is the biggest, but there are thousands of belter miners)
They will build the machines, to build the machines, before they even think of doming Marduk, because they need then for their company. Even before they start the dome, quite a few city buildings will be mostly done in-originally, they use the crater to calibrate and repair bugs with their droid prototipes, so they ketp building houses and palaces. By the time the dome construction starts, they won't be a lone fen and his AI buddie, they will have and entire company's worth of construction droids and many employees.

[Rakhasa]

 
Since there have been concerns of SOD, I have decided to spend a couple of days to create a rough time line, before going on with the rest of the city. (the rest of the days beyond "a couple" were, most emphatically, not spent in a downloading spree of ES: Oblivion mods, and a new romp of ruin exploring and Daedra killing, no matter what my IE history tab claims)

I soon found a "problem": The construction of the early years is absurdly fast. The Supers built a mile long skyscraper and then domed Kandor -with a whole city thrown in gratis- in three or four years. In less than a year, the Senshi moved from the Moon Kingdom Memorial, build Bristol and the shipyards, and raised Crystal Tokyo. Helium is a city full of giant towers. Disney moved an entire asteroid, hollowed it and built an entire park inside. To say nothing of massive space stations like Genaros or Central.

Only a small percentage of fen would have engineering experience, or, perhaps more importantly, actual construction works experience

Of course, that has a couple perfectly logical reasons (like the fact Logic went been crying in a corner as soon as Handwavium appeared, before it began to dress in black and join the Emo sub faction), but the main one is because “and then the nerds of the world move to space, where they spent fifty years trying to build cool things from their cramped space habitats” is a boring plotline.

So I have tentatively decided than building technology in general is on a similar category as life support, relatively easy to handwave and free of dangerous quirks. Probably every faction, minor faction and independent group has a small horde of construction droids and the like to help then. Those droids would be one of the main causes of accidental AI creation, too.

Given the magic of handwavium, it is also reasonable to think than an epic project than grips the imagination of its builders will actually go faster than a normal project, for reasons no one could really explain if asked.

With that in mind, rough timeline, which, as usual , can be changed later for dramatic reasons:

1 January 2008: Basic temporary habitats and gathering of raw materials had already begun, but this was the day chose for the ceremony for the First Stone of The Watchtower. The official date of birth of Kandor city.

Sometime in march 2008: A few months after the Watchtower begin to rise, the supers decide to think big and create a city in Daniell Crater. After long arguments, the city is named Kandor.

3 April 2008: After several months settled in Luna, Oscar and Bernie have patched most of the problems caused by their hasty departure. They earned resources by carving the foundations of the Tower, and then designed several minor droids to work in construction. After the supers decide to build a city, they decide to start a company. Genesis Construction & Development is born, with central offices in the Watchtower, Kandor City, Luna.

(The Watchtower is currently 2.5 meters tall, has no office space available, and Genesis is building their warehouses and droid factory in the newly designated industrial area north of the crater. That does not stop the company to brag, even later when their central offices are in Marduk and the Watchtower office job is basically doing public relations, than they are the First company to have Watchtower office space)

At this early stage (his main vehicle, and the designs based on it, are excavators) Genesis will specialize in basic infrastructure: Foundations, piping, terrain landscaping, gravity generators. As the city construction goes on and the company gets bigger, Genesis will eventually build the landscape of Kandor -the hills, lakes, streams, and related gravity, waste reciling, air and weather circulation structures, while other companies build the city itself.

February 2009: The latest prototype of droid is quirked, and a 4 meter statue of Jean Grey carved in the crater walls ends up skyscraper-sized. To avoid new problems, Oscar looks for a location outside Kandor to test new designs before unleashing then in (potentially) inhabited areas. He chooses Plynius Crater, and the Plynius Design Labs are born.

2009: Construction of the Genesis Ziggurat in Plynius. The centre of Plynius is slowly turning into a museum of monumental architecture, as Genesis' prototype droids build empty palaces and temples.

October 2009: Clark Universal and Garasu Materials design a massive dome to cover Daniell Crater., but no one is sure if the design will stand to the stress of a full dome after the artificial gravity emitters are online. Oscar offers the resources of Plynius Labs to build a scale model; the dome than will eventually be the Sumugan Gate district is built, and it shows than the design is sound, and the new doming spider droids work as advertised. Mostly. The Kandor dome begins; it is being built by Genesis, Clark, Garasu, and several other smaller companies.

Mid-2010: Kandor is domed, and most of the ground work is done, needing only fine-tuning; now than an high percentage of vehicles are not needed any more, Oscar starts contacting other habitats to offer his company's services.

In a sudden blue hair day, he decides to use his idle doming spiders to dome Plynius Crater. He offers a dozen minor belt mining companies to build then better habitats in exchange for a few megatons of raw materials.

October 2012: Marduk is the second domed city in Luna. People start to move in.

[M Fnord]

I like the cut of your gibberish, sir.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[robkelk]

I like the cut of your gibberish, sir.

Since we're in agreement... (snags the rubber stamp from Mal's desk)

... Of course, that has a couple perfectly logical reasons (like the fact Logic went been crying in a corner as soon as Handwavium appeared, before it began to dress in black and join the Emo sub faction), ...

I am extremely tempted to put this on the Senshi's Emo subfaction's writeup.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[HRogge]

Nice to get more story for Kandor AND another city on the moon!

[Black Aeronaut]

I like the cut of your gibberish, sir.

I can't add anymore than that.  Other than that you, sir, 'Get It'. 

[Rakhasa]

 
Thanks for the comments, guys! I did not expect the city to be so liked. Here is the next part:

The Lairs of Power: Genesis Ziggurat, Nana Hill and Enlil.

On the northern side of Plinius Crater stands the Genesis Ziggurat. This is was the first structure on the crater, and it is shaped like a ziggurat -it, and the wall surrounding the Black Forest, are the only structures actually built in the sumerian motif than gives the city its names. Since it was built long before there was a dome, it is a sealed construction, and most of its structure is actually underground.

Before there was a city, the ziggurat served as Genesis C&D headquarters, and hosted the Genesis Research Centre, where it designed, built and tried the company's construction drones (many of the crater's main buildings were built that way, even before there was a dome -or an actual city- planned). After Genesis created its genetic division it also set up its labs there. Eventually, the headquarters moved to Marduk Castle, and the droid design facilities moved to the industrial area in Sumugan Gate; only Genesis Genetics remain in the Ziggurat, which official propaganda claims is mostly abandoned. With the kind of gossip and myths than have sprung form the existence of the Black Forest, and the relish Mardukians show in telling visitors about the “hidden” forbidden experiments going on inside, no one is sure whether to believe the propaganda.

Around the Ziggurat grows the Black Forest. It is surrounded by a brick wall copied from the ruins of Babylon, with a brightly glazed gate and a scenic avenue, flanked by lamassu, than reaches the ziggurat stairs. Even those onlookers than don't know then entire forest only took a few months to grow, occasionally think there is something subtly wrong about the walls and the trees... and then they notice than the watchtowers are facing the wrong way, and is it just me or those tree limbs are closer to us than before?.

That is because the forest is entirely made up of pants than Oscar designed and handwaved. While the actual quirk than makes him 'wave vampire and/or carnivore plants is not widely known... the fact he keeps creating those plants is. The forest is very lush, though it seems its green is a few shades darker than normal. It is filled with small forest creatures like rabbits or squirrels, though no predators (and somehow the population does not increase...) and the tree limbs do show some tropisms. But the gossip and tales... no one will confess to have visited the forest, but the wilder and more lurid the tale, the more it will be repeated. Giant man eater plants, walking fungi, sentient Ucorn trees in the depths of the forest, and absolutely everyone in Marduk will swear than, while the outer wall only looks two or three miles long, you can get lost inside the forest and walk for weeks before finding civilization (not that you will, because the daisies will have eaten you by then)

Closer to humans, and covered with vegetables than, hopefully, are not plotting the Downfall of Humanity, is Nanna Hill. It is in the northern part of Marduk city itself, and is mostly a public park. On top of the hill rests Marduk Castle, a huge structure which probably has far too many towers, crenellations and gargoyles, and the headquarters of Genesis (also the private residence of Oscar Vykos and his AI family). The gargoyles change places and positions from time to time, when Bernie claims to get tired of the design. The rumours about the fact that no one eves sees workers actually moving the gargoyles, or about Genesis having experience in building all kinds of construction droids, which may not be that different in construction as defence droids, are dismissed as conspiracy theories

(sometimes it seems there are many, many conspiracy theories in Marduk. One of then, for instance, claims than Oscar is a firm believer than a Gothic steampunk city ruled by a vampire should be full of conspiracies and secret societies, and so happily spreads as many contradicting rumours as he feels like)

South of Nanna Hill, and sprawling on its slopes and the small valley in the centre of the peninsula, is Enlil District, the government district and the biggest concentration of monumental buildings of the city.

Long time residents will be able to point you the old prototype, pre-dome buildings (in general, bigger, grander, and of wide range of styles) and the newer constructions after the city was founded, with are usually in victorian neogothic or neoromantic styles, trying to meld all the older monuments into a whole.

The whole sector is a showpiece of palaces and avenues, but the Cortes Palace towers over then all.

The Cortes are both the parliament, city hall and cabinet of the city. Oscar Vykos ruled the city as, basically, an absolutist prince while it was being built, and for the the first two years (the Boskonian wars; he had not planned for it to last that long, but after a scare about a Boskonian infiltration attempt in 2013 he decided no take no chances of a chaotic change of power in mid war)

Two weeks after the Fall of Boskone Prime, after the celebrations fizzled out, Oscar announced than he was stepping down, and the the city would have an elected government from then on.

The head of government is the Canciller, elected in a crater-wide election every seven years. He can chose a vicecanciller, but all other ministry positions must be voted by the Procuradores in the Cortes.

The Cortes is a council or representatives. Every five years, the eight city districts, the six villages, and the Plinean University choose one Procurador each. There are two unlimited terms, for the current Commander of the Watch and the Archdruid (this is the fancy title given to the head of the life support and city planning department).

Currently there are also life Procuradores, which are voted by a two-thirds majority of the Cortes for several achievements; they can attend the sessions but usually have no vote. Extreme situations grant then a vote (they have never happened, since they are emergency powers like a declaration of war or sanctions against a foreign power, and they have not happened so far since the creation of the parliament). Once there are four honour Procuradores (there is just two of then now), they will also have veto power with an unanimous vote.

The current two honour procurators are Oscar Vykos and Sharon Cobbler, a motherly australian doctor than moved to fenspace to live with her fen children after a nasty divorce, and who more-or-less single-handedly built the Marduk Health Service.

[Foxboy]

Hmm. Seems to me that Marduk probably has the highest percentage of native Spanish speakers in Fenspace, and it confuses a lot of tourists because the local dialect is closer to European Spanish than that of the Americas... by conscious choice.

Though, there are some speakers of Marduk Spanish that, if they were speaking English, would sound like Southern Californians trying to use BBC English pronunciation.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll

[Rakhasa]

Foxboy wrote:

---

Hmm. Seems to me that Marduk probably has the highest percentage of native Spanish speakers in Fenspace, and it confuses a lot of tourists because the local dialect is closer to European Spanish than that of the Americas... by conscious choice.
Though, there are some speakers of Marduk Spanish that, if they were speaking English, would sound like Southern Californians trying to use BBC English pronunciation.

I have not gotten into it yet, but Marduk is the biggest concentration of actual spaniards in fenspace, so it's not so much "conscious choice" but "speaking their own dialtect".
Since Oscar is spanish, and owns a construction companty, when the spanish construction bubble explodes in 2021-11 he will take the oportunity to sweep in and hire, literally, thousands of experienced workers than are now jobless. About one third (7-10 thousand) of Mardukans are those spaniards and their families.
One of the gadgets than Genesis will build by the thousands (probably oursorced to another company, as it does not feel like the sort of thing Bernie or Oscar would develop) are translators. Unfortuantely for the average fen, before the Professor creates his multi-translator, they will be either spanish-to-english or spanish-to-japanese gadgets; they could never manage to build the English-to-(any language but spanish)

[Norgarth]

'Marduk Translators can be programmed to translate between any two languages*'

*as long as one of them is Spanish

8P
___________________________
"I've always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." - George Carlin

[Bob Schroeck]

...but because of a weird quirk, they are completely unable to translate Mexican Spanish to European Spanish. Attempting to do hangs the translator entirely.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Rakhasa]

Well, there was also the Mexican-Castillian prototype than dressed like a bullfighter and tried to cut the hearts of the research department on the top of the Ziggurat, while asking for a cup of tea.

Since no one is sure about the tea thing, everyone blamed the english. You can seldom go wrong blaming then anyway, even if they are 400,000 km from you.

[Rakhasa]

Here we go, the next part: 

Hearth and Home: Ningal, Nanmu and Ishkur.

While people live in any section of the city, those three districts are the main residential areas. Curiously, while most visitors think on steampunkers and goths as the prototype Mardukian, those live mainly on the rest of the city, while the residential zones have their own distinctive identities.

Ningal, the westernmost district, is the first neighbourhood most visitors will meet, as it hosts the rail terminal from the city's main gate.

Unlike the tourist areas, you will not find any art galleries, designer stores or souvenir shops here; this is a district of groceries, clothing, and dinner bars. Dane tourists seldom enter, but among fen this zone is know for its rock and punk pubs. And spirits; the Little Belt has one of the highest concentration of distilleries in fenspace (to the minor shock of Oscar Vykos, who had lovingly started a fancy wineries industry... Mardukan alcohol imports seldom are the kind you serve with white gloves)

Its habitants are mainly workers from the industrial section in Sumugan Gate. One of its stranger zones is the area known as the Little Belt, several neighbourhood were thousands of Belters now live.

Usually, one would think than the tough, libertarian belters and a bunch of effete artistic snobs from Luna would be natural enemies, but, as it did with so many things, the War changed everything. The last stages of the Marduk Dome project ended just as the peaceful utopia collapsed; like all other big company moguls, Oscar had to turn tracks and go in unexpected paths. Marduk's decorative walls got not-so-decorative weapon nests, the shipyards changed production from construction droids to warships, the construction sites in the Belt had to be abandoned or get an armed escort...

By 2012 the main commercial interests of Genesis were Belt habitats, so Oscar was well aware of rumours of trouble by the time of SOS-con; he had no doubts in adding his support. Genesis did not have much to give in soldier numbers, but it had a big construction facility far away from the front lines to build small ships and repair damaged ones. More importantly, when the battles began to rage and refugees began to pour into the inner system, he had an entire empty city available . He offered Marduk as a place for Belter refugees; at the height of the war, 60-70,000 belters were living in the city (more than twice its current population); their help was invaluable for finishing the crater so fast in the middle of a war. Most returned to their homes after the Fall of Boskone Prime (and the hangover from the month-long victory party) ended, but some remained.

At first, and second, sight, Nanmu district looks the most fendane section of the city. It is, actually; this is where the (mostly) spanish 'dane workers of Genesis live with their families. It would feel like a small spanish town, but for the cheerful, and tireless, efforts from the fen to assimilate their neighbours. Resistance is Futile.

This district is the hand-out of the more 'dane pseudofactions: Fans of noir detective stories, cop shows and mystery novels. That is in part due to the Church of Fenspace cathedral in the south of the peninsula. Taking his cue form Port Lowell, Oscar decided to name the church St. Joshua -”Joshua being, not an actual saint, but the pope-in-exile than fled the planet in the last chapter of Canticle for Leibowitz. As it happens, St. Joshua is also the catholic patron saint of spies, so any Mardukan fen who liked lurking and snooping (and which by their very fen nature tend to know a lot of useless trivia, like weird patron saints) gravitated there, dressed in long trenches and form-fitting dresses.

Fen never waste a chance to expand on a joke; all of the main factions, which kept a representation in Enlil, also have an official resident spy in Nanmu; they spend a lot of time following each other and doing strange signals to random passer-by (some of which may actually be true signals). There are rumours than a CIA spy from nearby Port Luna was once discovered, and Oscar sent a stern letter to Langley about the shocking breach of protocol -he was living in Innana! (the rumours are false, but after hearing then Oscar plans to do exactly that once the city Watch discovers an spy the want to unmask, just to see the face they have in Langley)

On the western tip of the peninsula is an ornate keep. This was once the second biggest watchouse (after the Headquarters in Utu), but when the Space Patrol was created Marduk reorganized its law enforcement; this is one of the two buildings ceded to the Space Patrol to serve as their headquarters (the other is one of the towers in the outer wall)

The skyline of Ishkur is the most dramatic in the city; a forest of fantasy towers, a huge coliseum rising like a giant in the middle. This is the quidditch stadium, and as it and the dozens of age towers tell in a glance, this is the magical district.

Potterites, trough, are a minority here. Marduk is the city for the goths, the necromancers, the dark sorceresses, the voodoo priests, the shifter shamans, and the vampire blood mages. In normal speak (which is rather frowned upon in most fen cities), those are the doctors, geneticists, and, for the ones who really are into the whole “evil” part, lawyers and accountants. In fact, most of the day-to-day care of the city life support systems and environment is done by those magical necromancers and shamans (and the ones living in Thronos Rokke); this shows in the formal title of the head f Life Support in the crater, “The Archdruid”

Incidentally, Marduk is possibly the only city on the Solar System than has created regulations and fines for the use of voodoo dolls against other people, and has a crater-wide Standard Zombie Apocalypse Operating Procedure. If this is a joke law to follow the city style, no one is telling.

And because handwavium is never willing to let go a good (or bad) joke:
-"Boss, boss! Good news! Someone at Nuevo Cuzco has managed to break the quirk in the translators, now we have one than does not translate to spanish!"
-"Wonderful. So we have the English-Japanese ready at last?"
-"Er... no. It is a Quechua-Isan translator."
-"..."
-"..."
-"Okay, I'll bite. What is Isan?"
-"A Laosian dialect from northern Thailand, or so wikipedia claims."
-"I think we have the only Incans in fenspace... are there any Isan speakers at all? Ot any other Thais, for that matter?"
-"Well... I think there are a few dozen in Kandor... and one group or two in Ganimedes and the Belt... some of then will speak Isan? Maybe?"

[robkelk]

Rakhasa, at this point, I'm not reading these critically as an editor any more. You don't need an editor to keep you in-style for Fenspace.

If I see something that steps on somebody else's toes, I'll say so. Otherwise, assume you have my okay... which means not-so-much, except that I seem to be the 2IC for Mal's vision for Fenspace nowadays. (I'm still not sure how that happened.) Keep the good writing coming, please...!
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012